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The Prescription for Search Results in Healthcare: Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

If you are a healthcare administrative professional, you know that overseeing a facility (or facilities) requires a lot of time and energy. But you must remember that healthcare – whether it is a private practice, hospital, or a chain of urgent care centers – is a business. Every business requires visibility in order to keep operating. How to accomplish this? The answer may be a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign.

Why bother with spending time and money on PPC in healthcare if SEO is free?

There are definite advantages of using search engine optimization (SEO) to get noticed. A list of positive online reviews helps place your facility’s name in the top results of an organic search. And, of course, SEO is free. And PPC costs money. But by putting extra time, effort – and yes, money – towards healthcare marketing services, you will strengthen your facility’s position in search results, and likely attain higher rankings.

What goes into a campaign for PPC in healthcare?

An article from Kraus Group Marketing details the advantages of incorporating this type of campaign into online strategy for any business – and yes, that includes PPC in healthcare. Once an advertisement for your healthcare facility is created through Google Ads, it will visually stand out in results alongside organic SEO listings whenever a potential customer conducts an online search. Despite the expense, you would only pay if the ad to your healthcare facility is clicked on. There are four factors to help build a successful healthcare marketing PPC campaign, and each are connected.

Quality Score: The quality score is a metric used by Google to determine where a page ranks in search and how much money is spent on pay-per-click in a Google AdWords campaign. The workings behind earning a strong quality score are similar to an auction: The higher the bid for relevant keywords matched to an ad increases the ranking of its position in search. It is therefore worthwhile to consider increasing spend on PPC to improve the ranking of your healthcare marketing.

Keyword Groups: Well-chosen keywords are instrumental in helping your particular ad get noticed. It is therefore worth taking the time to carefully research which keywords will connect your healthcare facility to prospective patients. Who is your audience? What type of healthcare facility are you promoting? Where is the location (or locations)? The answers to these questions will help you decide which keyword groups to select for effectively matching the right ad to the right audience and boost your healthcare marketing.

Landing Page: If a user sees the ad for your healthcare facility, and clicks on it, congratulations! The first step in making a good first impression has been made. They may want to learn more and then visit the website of your facility. To keep this impression positive, it is paramount that the website’s landing page – on all platforms – is up-to-date, easy to navigate, only provides basic information, and includes a very visible and clear call to action. An overcrowded landing page with too much content runs the risk of turning away prospective customers.

Follow-up: If you’ve read this far and have decided to either begin or intensify healthcare marketing with PPC for your facility, remember that these campaigns must be curated and tended to regularly. Or, more appropriately, they need regular checkups. If you have more than one campaign, you can compare one to the other and examine which one performs better. Also conduct A/B tests to discover which ads yield the best results and attract the most clicks to the Google Ads that represent your healthcare facility.

Quality professionals and centers in the healthcare field – from the most skilled surgeons to administrators of any and all medical settings – deserve gratitude, respect, and attention. And where gaining and keeping attention is concerned, a healthcare marketing PPC campaign may be just what the proverbial doctor ordered.

Learn more about the pay-per-click services that EGC can offer to take your healthcare marketing to the next level. Contact us today.